


The Pinnace of Popham

by CatKing_Catkin



Category: Changeling: The Lost
Genre: Abuse, Character Development, Character Study, Comrades in Arms, Dreams, Dreamwalking, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Insanity, Introspection, M/M, Male Friendship, Old Friends, Physical Abuse, Platonic Romance, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatKing_Catkin/pseuds/CatKing_Catkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for hc_bingo on Dreamwidth, prompt "isolation".</p><p>The road to insanity is long and slippery. Few Lost have the strength to come back from it. </p><p>Fortunately, there are options for helping them. Sometimes, they're not nice options, but sometimes, they're still the only chance unfortunate changeling has left. The Pinnace of Popham, located deep in the Hedge, is one such last resort. The hobgoblins that live there are fervent in their devotion to hard labor and honest, "clean" living, and vicious in dealing with any that don't seem to share their devotion.</p><p>Some time living in such a harsh environment, suffering beatings and starvation and dangerous chores, can ground even the maddest of changelings, and help them back to themselves. </p><p>Zeka has fallen far enough to warrant some time at Popham. He doesn't understand why, but Ayo had begged him to be good and do as he was told. For Ayo, Zeka will try. Even if the changes to his mind scare him, he'll stay, and endure, and hope for the day when it will all be over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pinnace of Popham

**Author's Note:**

> Zeka is a Beastkin Steepscrambler, Ayo is a Fairest Dancer.
> 
> Mostly, Changeling: The Lost has such a rich setting with so many fascinating characters. When I got my copy of Dancers in the Dusk, it was only a matter of where to start.
> 
> Because Zeka has always been a bit low on Clarity, and I headcanon that he got as low down as Clarity 2 before he really got it under control, I decided to start here.

You did your time at the Pinnace of Popham, and you thanked the freehold for giving you that chance. You thanked the hobgoblins who lived there for beating and starving you, and you thanked your freehold for maybe taking you back at the end of your sentence.

It wasn’t a kind law, it wasn’t a good option, but if you fell far enough that even the Crows wouldn’t touch you, that the Pinnace was your only hope of regaining your sanity before you lost what was left of your soul, you were lucky to even have options anymore.

As a result, many first time penitents went in completely blind to what they would be facing, if only because even a mad Lost was unlikely to consent if they knew the truth. Similarly, their friends and closest motley mates were kept in the dark. Normally, that was easy enough. The mad or near-mad didn’t tend to ask or understand at the best of times, and their friends were desperate for any last shred of hope.

Zeka didn’t know if Ayo knew what he’d been sending him in to. But then he thought of the look on his best friend’s face when they parted, how sad he’d looked. He thought about how Ayo had placed his hands on both sides of Zeka’s face, stared deep into his eyes, and implored him, really and truly pleading with him, to “be good”, and “behave”. He’d begged Zeka to do as he was told until one of the motley came for him, and Zeka had agreed, because it had been Ayo asking him.

Ayo must have known.

The Pinnace of Popham was not a nice place. They worked him hard and merciless at a dozen and two little tasks every single day. Every morning, he had to draw water from a well deep in the midst of a grove of carnivorous trees where the ground turned to quicksand beneath his feet – they tied weights around his arms and legs, because they didn’t want him climbing up and swinging away. He had to scrounge for his own food, whatever he could find. Sometimes, there was goblin fruit, or the odd hobgoblin that he could corner in an unfriendly corner of the Hedge and bludgeon to death with a thumping pole. Sometimes, there was nothing. He had to work anyway.

Sewing clothes for Hobgoblins covered in spikes that tore them again the moment they donned them.

Repairing walls and roofs and doors with an adhesive that burned his skin to touch and left his hands blistering.

Digging places in the fields for seeds that sprouted as he turned his back and tried to strangle him with their thorny stems.

 Preparing food out of strange fruits and meats that he didn’t recognize, that released a hallucinogenic haze when he cut into them with his knives, and more often than not led to him ruining the meal.

And always, always keeping at it, because the beatings were so much worse. And they only ever noticed him to notice when he’d done wrong, and beat him with sticks and chains and fists and words.

Zeka spent every day looking forward to when he could finally sleep. He had a mat to call his own, behind the house of the twisted little hobgoblin family that were apparently his “patrons”. He slept out in the open, exposed and vulnerable, while the Hedge chattered and screamed around him.

Zeka had never been afraid of the Hedge before that time – he knew it, it knew him, it did what he said and obeyed his call – but he soon grew to fear the neat little rows of bushes full of thorns. Because of that, sleep grew harder and harder to find by the night.

But he sought it hungrily all the same.

Because if he slept, sometimes, Zeka could still dream.

And if he could dream, he might find Ayo there waiting for him. And of absolutely all the torments he had to endure in the town, the worst, the most maddening, was the loneliness, the isolation, and the silence. No making up stories, no singing, no talking. The world around him was drab and unfriendly, the work was hard and tormenting, and he could have faced it all if only he didn’t have to face it alone.

But if he could just escape into his dreams, where Ayo could watch over him and keep him safe, Zeka knew that he could endure absolutely anything.

“I shouldn’t even be here,” Ayo murmured. He’d crafted a dreamscape for Zeka of the rooftop of the tallest building in the world, so tall that clouds scudded by around the top floors and the world below was tiny and toy-like. It wasn’t as tall as some of the buildings in Arcadia had been, but Zeka didn’t want a place as tall as the buildings in Arcadia. Here, the sun was warm, the sky was blue, the wind was gentle, and he and Ayo could lay side by side and watch the clouds contort themselves into fantastic shapes.

But it wasn’t real. That had never bothered Zeka before, but it did, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. It put him even more off balance than he normally was.

“Then why are ya?!”

Because even if he was glad to see Ayo, deliriously ridiculously over-the-moon-and-back glad, that didn’t change the fact that he’d been left here, and he didn’t know why, and Ayo wasn’t saying.

He felt bad for snapping immediately, though. He’d pushed himself up reflexively on his elbows, and in doing so, Zeka saw that there was so much sadness in Ayo’s smile, and Zeka never wanted Ayo to be sad. Not just because he might stop coming, but because Ayo should never be sad.

“Because you’re under a lot of stress, here,” he said. “I want to make sure you’ll still…be here, when I get back.”

Zeka was mad, although he was growing slowly less mad by the day. Even he knew that Ayo wasn’t talking about his physical presence. Zeka had suffered from awful nightmares for as long as he could remember, long before coming back to the world and continuing ever since. The flashbacks to his durance might have driven him properly and truly insane long ago, if not for Ayo walking his dreams with him.

“I’ll be here,” he mumbled, in a far more subdued voice. “I promised.”

Ayo looked relieved to see Zeka’s anger fade, which made Zeka’s heart feel like it was breaking in his chest. His friend’s next words, soft as a breeze, made him want to cry where almost nothing else had.

“…I miss you, Zeka. Please, get better.”

“…miss you, too, Ayo. Tons and bunches and lots.” He forced himself to smile – he could tell by the look on Ayo’s face that he didn’t believe a word of it, but it was the thought that counted, right? “‘S dull as a big flat boring place here without you, mate.”

“Likewise. But…” He reached out a hand and rested it against Zeka’s cheek. His touch was gentle, and careful, as it always was. Here, Zeka didn’t flinch, even though he’d long ago grown to hate the sting of being touched. “…I’m glad you had this chance.” He admitted it like a shameful secret. To Zeka, it was – he still didn’t know what being in the Pinnace was supposed to accomplish for him, just that everyone seemed to think he should be grateful to be there. But this time, he stayed silent. He just listened, in the hopes that this time, maybe this time, Ayo might explain.

He didn’t. Zeka learned later that he’d been afraid that explaining might break the spell like a soap bubble, and leave Zeka just as badly off as he’d been before. It was a mad sort of system, when explained aloud. The beatings, the starving, the hard and backbreaking and merciless toil, was all so very grounding. The Pinnace of Popham was a place of severity and rules so markedly diverse from the rest of the Hedge, that changelings teetering on the very brink of madness were sometimes sent there to “recover” their wits.

It wasn’t a nice system. But sometimes, it was your only hope.

Hope. That was the thing. That was always the thing, the most important thing, the thing that got you up in the morning and sent you off to sleep at night. It was the thing that kept you trying to climb even as the weights dragged at your normally deft limbs. And you learned to endure, and you got stronger, until the beatings didn’t rattle your senses so badly, and all the traps weren’t quite so deceptive, and the weights didn’t drag so much.

And you kept on climbing, up and up the bell tower that rang the hobs to service every day. And one day, you reached the peak. And even if it wasn’t as tall as the one in your dreams, it was closer to the sky, and there was a roof to lie on and watch the clouds, and listen to the memory of your best friend’s voice, and pretend he was by your side.

Hope was different from madness. Madness might keep you up on that roof, listening to the voices forevermore. But hope would bring you back down again, where there would be chastisements and beatings and more labor. And you would endure, in the hope that the day was approaching soon when you would look up, and he would be there, in the world of the waking as well as the world of sleep.

One day, Zeka looked up, and Ayo was.


End file.
